Vlanton, Elias, with Zak Mettger.
Who Killed George Polk? The Press Covers Up a Death in the Family.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. 322 pages.  $27.95.

     The short career of CBS reporter George Polk, a younger contemporary of Edward R. Murrow, is commemorated in the Polk Award for excellence in journalism.  All who receive it must do so with a twinge of bad conscience, for the frame-up of a colleague in his still-unsolved murder, willingly underwritten by some of America's most prominent journalists, haunts the profession to this day.

     The undisputed facts are these.  Polk, concluding an assignment for CBS in Greece, was last seen alive in Salonika on May 8, 1948.  Eight days later, his body was fished out of the city's bay.  He was bound and blindfolded; his effects and his money were intact, except for an identity card that had been mailed anonymously to the police in a hand-addressed envelope.

     The murder of an American journalist in a front-line area of the Cold War, where an American-backed rightist government was battling a Communist insurgency, was bound to have repercussions.  Polk was known to have sought contact with the rebel leader Markos Vafiadis while in Salonika, and his execution-style slaying, coupled with the absence of theft, strongly suggested a hit from the right.  This inconvenient thesis was rejected by the government, which announced, in advance of any evidence, that the Communists were responsible for Polk's death.

     In the U.S., meanwhile, Polk's journalistic brethren urged action.  The left-leaning New York newspaper Guild formed an investigative commission, but its efforts were preempted by the so-called Lippmann Committee, led by columnist Walter Lippmann, whose members represented the cream of establishment journalism, including Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer, radio commentator Elmer Davis, and James Reston of the New York Times.  CBS contributed $10,000 in start-up funds, and lent its Washington commentator, Joseph C. Harsch, as secretary.  Unlike the impecunious Guild Commission, whose approaches Lippmann loftily rebuffed, the Committee's stated objective was simply to monitor events in Greece.  In retaining as its counsel, however, General William J. Donovan, the wartime head of the OSS and a founding father of the CIA, it tied itself in to the highest echelons of government.  In effect, the Committee gave the Truman administration cover to dispatch a proconsul to Greece, who could direct and visible pressure on the local authorities to provide a politically correct solution to the case.

     Donovan's pressure produced the desired result.  By autumn, police announced that a Greek journalist, Gregory Staktopoulos, had confessed to arranging a meeting between Polk and two Communist leaders, Adam Mouzenides and Evangelos Vasvanas, who had rowed him off-shore and, in Staktopoulos's presence, executed him.  They did not add that this confession had been extracted from (or rather, dictated to) Staktopoulos after six weeks of torture.  Staktopoulos's mother, Anna, who likewise "confessed" to having mailed Polk's identity card to the police after seeing her son hanging by his feet was also indicted.  At a show trial in April 1949, Staktopoulos was convicted of complicity in Polk's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Mouzenides and Vasvanas were convicted of murder and sentenced to death in absentia, in Mouzenides's case extreme absentia since he had died at least a month before Polk's murder.

     The principal interests in the case all pronounced themselves satisfied: the Greek government, which had appeased its American patron; the State Department, Donovan's government liaison; CBS, which gave the verdict a qualified endorsement; and the Lippmann Committee, which offered its own imprimatur in a report not issued until 1952.  Staktopoulos was released from prison in 1960, by which time the case had begun to emit a noticeable stench.  The late 1970s seemed a more propitious time to square this old Cold War account.  But the Greek Supreme Court rejected both Staktopoulos's petition for a new trial and Vasvanas's offer to return from exile to answer charges.

      The matter did not rest there.  Staktopoulos published his memoirs in 1984, detailing his tortures, and a new generation of journalists, with access to previously classified documents, reopened the case.  In 1989 the first book-length account in English appeared, Edmund Keeley's The Salonika Bay Murder.  His was followed by Kati Marton's The Polk Conspiracy in 1990, and now Elias Vlanton has published the fruit of two decades of investigation in Who Killed George Polk?  Nearly half a century after Polk's death, his ghost will not rest, nor will what some have referred to as "the Greek Dreyfus case."  (At this writing, Gregory Staktopoulos is still alive.)

     Who killed Polk will probably never be established to general satisfaction.  Simple foul play seems ruled out by the absence of robbery, although it is at least conceivable that petty thugs, panicking when they realized they had killed a person of some consequence, decided to disguise their victim's murder as a political assassination.  The official story has long been discredited.  The Communists had neither motive nor opportunity to kill Polk, and they subsequently welcomed another journalist into their midst to do precisely the story Polk had wanted.

     The consensus of investigators is that Polk was killed by the political right.  There were several shadowy death squads operating in and around Salonika, one of which, with or without government approval, might have entrapped Polk.  The question of motive remains.  Polk had been critical of the government in his dispatches, but so had others.  His tour of duty was up, and he was planning to write a book about his experiences in the Middle East in which Greece would presumably figure only marginally, if at all.  Another evident problem for any conspiracy thesis was that his presence in Salonika was an accident, since he had planned to fly to Kavalla and had only been diverted by bad weather.  Anyone intending to kill Polk would have had only a day and a half to concoct and execute a plan, since he arrived on a Friday morning and disappeared on Saturday night.

     These problems, as well as a complete lack of substantiating evidence, did not deter Kati Marton from announcing that she had cracked the case in The Polk Conspiracy.  Marton claimed that Polk had been killed by a rightist operative, Michael Kourtessis, at the behest of Deputy Prime Minister Constantine Tsaldaris, whom Polk was allegedly about to expose for skimming aid funds.  I will not dwell on the gross absurdities of her account, which I have discussed elsewhere¹ and which are thoroughly rehearsed in Vlanton's book.

     Vlanton puts forward a thesis of his own, that Polk was murdered by local rightist smugglers fearful of being exposed by him and acting on their own initiative.  This scenario is based on testimony volunteered to the U.S. Embassy in 1953 by a Salonika seamstress, Soula Karanthou.  Vlanton admits that Karanthou's account is circumstantial and unverified; she neither witnessed any incriminating action nor even heard specific talk of a murder.  The most that can be said for it is that, unlike Marton's story, it is not inconsistent with the known facts.  Vlanton is too good a reporter to claim more, but he would have been better advised to treat Karanthou's tale as he does other inconclusive leads.

     Vlanton does make one startling assertion on the basis of Karanthou's testimony: that Nikos Mouscoundis, the head of Salonika's general security forces and the chief investigator in the Polk case, was informed of his death the morning after by its perpetrators, and that even before the discovery of his body he set in motion a cover-up (p. 187).  It is no pleasure to defend the reputation of Mouscoundis, who certainly did stage a cover-up later and not only oversaw but participated in Staktopoulos's torture.  There isn't a shred of evidence to support the assertion that he knew the true identity of Polk's killers, however, except the boast of a man overheard by Karanthou that Mouscoundis had "cleared him" (183-184).2  Even as speculation, it strains credulity that Polk's murderers would have expected protection for their high-profile crime or that Mouscoundis would have risked his career for the sake of some expendable riff-raff.  Nor, if the fix had been in from the beginning, did Mouscoundis need to wait until August to pick up Staktopoulos, a prime suspect from the outset.  It is likelier that Mouscoundis conducted a more or less serious investigation, albeit one that presupposed a Communist plot, and that he settled on Staktopoulos as his patsy only when American pressure became too intense and nothing better turned up.

     The more significant aspect of the case, at least at this juncture, is how the press was brought in on the fingering of Staktopoulos, thereby conniving at both the cover-up of one colleague's murder and the framing of another.  The key to this was the retention of General Donovan as counsel to the Lippmann Committee.  He appears to have been recruited by Lippmann and Ernest K. Lindley, the president of the Overseas Writers Association, under whose aegis the Committee functioned.  They did not choose alone; Secretary of State George Marshall was also a party in the decision.  Donovan's legendary status as a spymaster and his position within the establishment gave him unassailable credibility, as well as immediate access to the highest levels of the Greek government.  He was thus ideally situated to effect a politically salutary outcome, and he did so.  Whether Lippmann and Lindley were complicit in this from the beginning is a question, but neither man was a babe in the woods.  Both knew that if Donovan did not catch the right man, he would make sure that someone was caught.

     The same was true of CBS, which had dispatched two correspondents to the scene and devoted four on-air programs to the Polk case.  The correspondents did little except to collect government and embassy handouts, and the programs-vetted and corrected by the State Department on at least one occasion-largely parroted the official line.  Some of Polk's network colleagues privately scoffed at the Greek government's investigation, but little more than veiled skepticism reached the airways.  Corporate CBS, too, understood the national interest.

     There the matter rested, until in November 1990 the network broke more than four decades of silence on the Polk case in a Sixty Minutes segment that served as a forum, if not merely an advertisement, for Kati Marton's views.  So-called investigative journalism has rarely sunk lower, and Vlanton is properly scathing in his review of the broadcast.  Why did CBS supinely endorse Marton's conclusion?  Ed Bradley of CBS declined, or more precisely ignored my request for comment.  One can only presume that the intense publicity surrounding Marton's book-she was then the wife of ABC anchor Peter Jennings-compelled the network to respond, while its thesis offered, once again, "closure."  The culprit finally discovered, CBS could at last put paid to criticisms of its own conduct.

     From Ed Murrow to Ed Bradley, the record of establishment journalism in the Polk affair has been a sorry one.  But not all of Polk's colleagues failed him.  I. F. Stone published a blistering critique of the Lippmann Committee report when it was issued, characterizing its members, with exactitude, as a "bunch of ... stuffed shirts."  Stone had no difficulty airing his views; he published his own paper.  Getting them noticed was another matter.  Other journalists, including John Donovan, Ted Berkman, Constantine Poulos, and William Price, tried to resurrect the Polk case for years; blighted careers were their only reward.  It is one of the signal merits of Vlanton's book-which takes its place with Keeley's as the only substantive work in English on the Polk case-that he gives due credit to these men of conscience, and tells their forgotten story.

     Perhaps the greatest irony of the Polk affair is that Polk himself was an ardent Cold Warrior, one of that breed of postwar newsmen who, in the wake of American empire, felt it incumbent on themselves to journalistically police its more distant satrapies.  Undoubtedly sincere in his detestation of corruption and injustice, he was naive about their function as instruments of policy.  General Donovan was not.  George Polk was a casualty of empire; later he became a sacrifice to it.  Had someone else died in his place, would he have stood with the Walter Lippmanns or the John Donovans?  We will never know, but there's an award in his name nonetheless.
 
ROBERT ZALLER
Drexel University

     ¹The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 18, 1990; "Who Killed George Polk? A Resifting of the Clues," Media History Digest, 13, 1 (Spring-Summer 1993): 11-17.
     ²Vlanton's comment in another context is apposite: "raw intelligence [is] of little value unless confirmed" (159).